Uprooted(25)
Author: Naomi Novik

That thought only made me feel more sulky, of course. So, too, did the slogging work of cleaning my poor little room and changing my bed; the stains wouldn’t come out, and everything smelled foul, though without the terrible wrongness. Finally I decided, for this, I would use magic after all. I began to use one of the charms the Dragon had taught me, but then I instead went and dug up the journal from the corner. I was grateful to that little book and the past wizard or witch who had written it, even if the Dragon wasn’t to me, and I was happy to find, near the beginning, a charm for freshening a room: Tishta, sung up and down, with work to show the way. I warbled it half in my head while I turned out all the damp, stained ticking. The air grew cold and crisp around me, but without any unpleasant bite; by the time I had finished, the bedclothes were clean and bright as though they were new-washed, and my ticking smelled like it was fresh from a summer haystack. I assembled my bed again, and then I sat down upon it very heavily, almost surprised, as the last dregs of desperation left me, and with them all my strength. I fell down on the bed and barely managed to drag my coverlet over me before I slept.

I woke slowly, peacefully, serenely, with sunlight coming in the window over me, and only gradually became aware that the Dragon was in my room.

He was sitting by the window, in the small work-chair, glaring at me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and glared back. He held up the tiny book in his hand. “What made you pick this up?” he demanded.

“It was full of notes!” I said. “I thought it must be important.”

“It is not important,” he said, although for how angry he seemed over it, I didn’t believe him. “It is useless—it has been useless, for all five hundred years since it was written, and a century of study has not made it anything other than useless.”

“Well, it wasn’t useless today,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

“How did you know how much rosemary to use?” he said. “How much lemon?”

“You used all sorts of amounts, in those tables!” I said. “I supposed it didn’t much matter.”

“The tables are of failures, you blundering imbecile!” he shouted. “None of them had the least effect—not in any parts, not in any admixture, not with any incantation—what did you do?”

I stared at him. “I used enough to make a nice smell, and steeped them to make it stronger. And I used the chant on the page.”

“There is no incantation here!” he said. “Two trivial syllables, with no power—”

“When I sang it long enough, it made the magic flow,” I said. “I sang it to ‘Many Years,’ ” I added. He went even more red and indignant.

He spent the next hour interrogating me as to every particular of how I had cast the spell, growing ever more upset: I could scarcely answer any of his questions. He wanted exact syllables and repetitions, he wanted to know how close I had been to his arm, he wanted the number of rosemary twigs and the number of peels. I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong, and finally I blurted out, as he wrote angrily on his sheets, “But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just—a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.”

I finished triumphantly, pleased to have found an explanation which felt so satisfyingly clear. He only flung down his pen and slumped angrily back in his chair. “That’s nonsense,” he said, almost plaintively, and then stared down at his own arm with an air of frustration: as though he would rather have the corruption back, instead of having to consider that he might be wrong.

He glared at me when I said as much—I was beginning to be in something of a temper by then myself, thirsty and ravenously hungry, still wearing Krystyna’s ragged homespun dress that hung off my shoulder and didn’t keep me warm. Fed up, I stood, ignoring his expression, and announced, “I’m going down to the kitchen.”

“Fine,” he snapped, and stormed off to his library, but he couldn’t bear an unanswered question. Before my chicken soup had even finished cooking, he appeared at the kitchen table again, carrying a new volume of pale blue leather tooled in silver, large and elegant. He set it down on the table next to the chopping block and said firmly, “Of course. It’s that you’ve an affinity for healing, and it led you to intuit the true spell—even though you can’t remember the particulars accurately anymore. That would explain your general incompetence: healing is a particularly distinct branch of the magical arts. I expect you will progress considerably better going forward, once we devote our attention to the healing disciplines. We’ll begin with Groshno’s minor charms.” He lay a hand on the tome.

“Not until I’ve eaten lunch, we won’t,” I said, not pausing: I was chopping carrots.

He muttered something under his breath about recalcitrant idiots. I ignored him. He was happy enough to sit down, and to eat the soup when I gave him a bowl, with a thick slice of peasant bread that I’d made—the day before yesterday, I realized; I had only been out of the tower for a day and a night. It seemed a thousand years. “What happened with the chimaera?” I asked around my spoon as we ate.

“Vladimir’s not a fool, thankfully,” the Dragon said, wiping his mouth with a conjured napkin. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking of the baron. “After he sent his messenger, he baited the thing close to the border by staking out calves and having his pikemen harry it from every other direction. He lost ten of them, but he managed to get it not an hour’s ride from the mountain pass. I was able to kill it quickly. It was only a small one: scarcely the size of a pony.”

He sounded strangely grim about it. “Surely that’s good?” I said.

He looked at me in annoyance. “It was a trap,” he bit out, as though that was obvious to any sensible person. “I was meant to be kept away until the corruption had overrun all of Dvernik, and worn down before I came.” He looked down at his arm, opening and closing his fist. He’d changed his shirt for one of green wool, clasped with gold at the wrist. It covered his arm; I wondered if there were a scar beneath.